I caught this at the Luna back in November as part of the Akira Kurosawa retrospective and was happily gobsmacked to find screen one nearly full. It was the biggest crowd I've seen at the cinema for a long while. Kurosawa still packing them in! It's actually the first non-samurai film of his I've seen but it has his stamp of lingering, physically moving mid-shots and busy action within the frame of the wider shots.
The setting is Yokohama, Japan in the early 1960s (the film was made in 1963). A shoe company executive, Gondo (Toshiro Mifune) is planning a share takeover when his son's friend, mistaken for the son, is kidnapped. The kidnapper demands roughly the same amount of money required to finalise the financial coup, putting Gondo in quite the tsukemono!
Mifune is commanding in the lead (odd seeing him in a suit) but detective 'Bos'n' Taguchi (Kenjiro Ishiyama) is the standout. He looks like so many of the oji-sans hanging out at the horse tracks of Japan and he brings the majority of the chuckles. Tsutomo Yamazaki as the kidnapper, and Tatsuya Nakadai as the chief investigator offer fantastic support.
There's an extended surveillance sequence including a swinging dance club (which even had some westerners!), and a sojourn to a crack alley, along with some pretty antiquated attitudes toward women. One thing the film does that still resonates today is take an askance look at the chasm between the haves and the have-nots. The audience is asked to sympathise with Gondo, but only up to a point. Will he pay the ransom for his son? Probably. But when he finds out it's his chauffeur's son, does this queer the pitch? Maybe. The Gondo residence, high up on the hill, overlooking the poor, lower neighbourhood of the kidnapper provides a reason for his actions.
It's a gripping story, with a police procedural slant and an unexpected heroin element thrown in for good measure. The title in Japanese - 天国と地獄 (Tengoku to Jigoku) - translates as Heaven and Hell, and the kidnapper at the end says, "I don't care if I go to hell. My life has been hell since the day I was born. But if I had to go to heaven, then I'd really start to tremble." Cracking writing.
The longish runtime zooms by and actually leaves you wanting more of this postwar Japan setting. I shouldn't have been surprised really, it's Kurosawa after all, but I wasn't expecting this level of 'modern' brilliance. I must get into some more of his non-samurai work.
See also:
Amazingly, Spike Lee has just made a remake of High and Low called Highest 2 Lowest, starring Denzel Washington and it's due to be released sometime in the first half of this year (2025). Big shoes and all that. And of course, Kurosawa's Yojimbo (1961) is peak filmmaking. Get it into your eyeballs.
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